Humans may engage in human-to-computer dialogs with interactive software applications referred to herein as “automated assistants” (also referred to as “digital agents,” “chatbots,” “interactive personal assistants,” “intelligent personal assistants,” “assistant applications,” “conversational agents,” etc.). For example, humans (which when they interact with automated assistants may be referred to as “users”) may provide commands and/or requests to an automated assistant using spoken natural language input (i.e. utterances), which may in some cases be converted into text and then processed, and/or by providing textual (e.g., typed) natural language input.
Automated assistants can be installed at a variety of different devices such as, for example, mobile phones and personal computers. A user can cause a particular application at a mobile phone or a personal computer to perform a particular action by interacting with a respective automated assistant. However, in order to exhibit uniformity of functionality across different devices, a user may be required to install instances of the same application synchronously across the different devices. As a result, network bandwidth may be quickly preoccupied with transmitting duplicative application updates for each instance of the application and generally communicating data between each instance of the application. Moreover, as each instance of the application may require some amount of disk space on their respective device, memory allocation across devices may be employed inefficiently.
In some contexts, interacting with a particular application via an automated assistant may not be convenient depending on how engaged a user may be in a particular environment, and/or whether other devices are being operated by other users nearby. For instance, replying to messages via an automated assistant on a mobile phone can be difficult while the user is driving in a vehicle. Furthermore, when the user is driving with other people in the vehicle, those people may also have devices with automated assistants, which may be indirectly invoked as the user engages with their respective automated assistant. Such a result can create an environment of heightened distractions while driving, and waste computational resources at those devices that may be inadvertently affected.